Among the many items on the list of Things to Know about Parenting, those surrounding the subject of embarrassment figure prominently.

Terry Marotta

Among the many items on the list of Things to Know about Parenting, those surrounding the subject of embarrassment figure prominently.

Heaven knows that in their early years, your children embarrass YOU, as when your 3-year-old drains the cup of cranberry juice set before him in the fine restaurant, smacks his lips and exclaims, “This wine is GOOD!”

They also speak out of turn: “Is Daddy a pain in the neck?” the same child will also ask in front of the visiting clergyperson.

But with children, the much longer-lasting stage is the one when you as a parent are embarrassing to THEM.

As an intolerant 13-year-old, I was hugely embarrassed by my mom. That time she stumbled and fell to her knees on the steep stone stairway to the public library? I actually kept on climbing, pretending I didn’t know her.

When I was in that excruciating what-will-they-think-of me stage of life, she embarrassed me even when she wasn’t falling down: the way she talked so loud; the way, when she picked me up after school, she always glared at the smokers, draped like limp strips of bacon over the hoods of cars.

“What are those CHILDREN doing with CIGARETTES?” she would bellow, scowling over at the very people I prayed would befriend me one day. “Why aren’t they home riding their bikes?!”

Back then, I thought there just couldn’t BE a parent more embarrassing to her kids.

Now I feel another way, because now I too am a sorry, out-of-it grownup with my own long list of Crimes against Coolness.

Many is the time I have embarrassed my own children - and many are the lessons I have learned along the way.

Let me list a few here, in fact:

(1) Thin is overrated. Sure, it’s probably healthier to be too thin than too plump, but exactly no one likes you better because of it.

(2) Old wool sweaters are cool, as your kids will tell you. Those elaborately figured and/or sequined Golden Girls-style numbers you’re so drawn to at the holidays aren’t.

(3) Your curly hair isn’t half as weird as you think it is so really you can stop with the flatiron, because – and let us recite this together - NO ONE IS LOOKING AT YOU, MOM.

And a number of other truths come to mind as well, including:

(4) The truth that nobody irons, besides us old people.

(5) The truth that nobody under 50 wears pantyhose (about which fact I will only observe that nobody OVER 50 thinks this is anything but dumb.)

(6) The truth that disposable cameras are very last century and really, Dad, don’t even come to the party if you’re planning to pull out one of those silly things.

And finally:

(7) Mom, please lose the tiny backpack. It makes you look like Pinocchio. You might as well add a pencil case, short pants and a pair of suspenders.

I include this last because I sometimes sense my grown children eyeing my own tiny backpack, which I have been wearing steadily since 1998. They are too kind to say anything though, which I greatly appreciate, since the way I see it is, “Why waste money on a million different pocketbooks when you can get away with just one?”

And maybe that’s it in a nutshell right there:

The young are intent on beauty, maybe because they have so much beauty themselves.

We old people though: We old people are just lookin’ for what lasts.

Write Terry at terrymarotta@verizon.net or c/o Ravenscroft Press, PO Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890, or in the “open comments” section of her blog Exit Only at www.terrymarotta.wordpress.com.